Wire spool guides and their use is well known and commonly disclosed in the prior art. Moreover, this crowded art offers various shapes and sizes for addressing widely different objectives.
Some of these prior art devices have designs comprising guides that assist users with dispensing threads, conduits, wires, twine or other similarly spooled materials. Generally, these known devices implement wire-guiding elements or structures that require users to thread the spooled material through some tubular structure (for example such as an eye bolt) or similar single-opening structure that is circumferentially or perimetrically closed around the opening; as will be explained further below, this approach is inefficient and unnecessarily time consuming.
Some devices have features and characteristics that include moving components designed to attach to a spool and or adjust elements of the spool guide; these devices, however, are difficult to detach and reattach to other spools, thus limiting the versatility of the devices.
Yet other devices include entire assemblies for providing guides to numerous spools stored in such assemblies; again, making their use with various applications (i.e. varying types of spools) cumbersome, or simply impossible.
Examples of known wire spool guides include U.S. Pat. No. 5,516,059 to Gudgeon et al., which discloses a wire guide to control and contain electrical wire as it is pulled off a standard spool that is rotating about a spindle. The guide has side plates that rest alongside the spool. Adjustable length guide bars extend between the side plates with the wire passing between the guide bars to guide the wire. However, one problem with this device is that the wire is not easily kept in a center portion of the guide so as to fully protect the wire from becoming untangled or snagged by commonly damaged spool hubs. Another problem with this device is that it is cumbersome to attach or couple to a spool; that is, it requires some assembly to attach to a spool—which is of course undesirably time-consuming. Similarly, detaching the device from the spool is unnecessarily cumbersome. Moreover, the guide mechanism is limited in that it requires threading and does not necessarily keep the spooled material at a centered position, which gives rise to other problems including tangling the spooled material with often broken spool flanges.
Another example of known wire spool guides includes U.S. Pat. No. 7,124,980 to Giovannoni, which discloses a wire spool assembly. That wire spool guide assembly comprises a conduit through which wire is dispensed. The assembly has at least one wire spool guide, a handle bar and a spindle. The spindle is typically part of a wire spool cart. The guide includes an eyebolt rotatably mounted to a support frame via a ball bearing. The eye bolt guides wire as it is dispensed from the spool. This device has a similar problem as other spool guides, which require the spooled material (i.e. wire, thread, twine, etc.) to be threaded through the eye bolt or wire guide element. As mentioned above, this required motion can be unduly burdensome and time consuming on the field. Furthermore, this device is typically included with a cart, meaning that use of the device is limited to spools situated on that cart. Moreover, the coupling mechanism requires assembly, which means that switching the guide from one spool to another spool (not situated on the same cart, for example) requires that device to be disassembled and reassembled prior to each use.
Another example of known wire guides includes U.S. Patent Publication 2006/0006276 to Wyatt, which discloses hanging and distributing both spooled and non-spooled products. This device has several drawbacks, one of such drawbacks being that this device too requires the spooled material to be threaded through the guide.
Other examples include U.S. Pat. Nos. D739717, D739718, D739719, D740644, and D741154 to Brown, which disclose ornamental designs for various wire spool guides. Other known examples for similar guides (although used with other materials such as threads, yarns and twine) include: U.S. Pat. No. 95,271 to Schrader; U.S. Pat. No. 316,595 to Adams; and U.S. Pat. No. 444,866 to Werner. All of these device designs carry one or more of the problems outlined above.
Known devices, such as those briefly described above, offer different alternatives at guiding a spooled material such as wires, threads, or twines, but each has one or more shortcomings. For example: all of these known devices require the wire or spooled material to be threaded through a single opening that is circumferentially or perimetrically closed; each of these devices is cumbersome to attach or couple to a spool, and difficult or impossible to detach and reattach to varied sizes of spools; and the guide structures do not necessarily keep material from falling off the edges of the spool, or prevent the material from getting snagged when broken spool edges present snag-points. Moreover, the more complex, cumbersome prior art devices typically comprise several parts and components, making them less efficient and costlier to manufacture.
Therefore, there exists a previously unappreciated or inadequately-met need for a new and improved wire spool guide that: allows a user to easily weave a spooled material into a wire-guiding element without requiring the material to be threaded; implements a coupling mechanism that allows for quick and efficient implementation with varying sized spools; is configured or constructed in such a way that obviates problems often caused by damaged spool hub edges; and may be manufactured efficiently and in an inexpensive manner. It is to these ends that the present invention has been developed.